[BusyBox] Hi all

[Erik Andersen]

Howdy.  First, my appologies for being a bit silent recently.  Towards the end
of my trip to the Embedded Systems Conference my laptop died.  As in the BIOS
wouldn't even post or anything.  So I took it to the IS dept on Monday.  They
determined the MBR was broken.  So they formatted the hard drive and installed
Win2K.  It has taken me till today to get my computer basically back to normal,
though I did end up losing a bunch of things.  In the future, remind me to
avoid the IS dept. <Grrrr>

Anyways, I have been looking over the "Changing the way help is displayed"
thread.  I've started to put something together to try and address some of the
concerns.  Basically I see several problems being discussed, but I think all
the problems stem from a single fundamental issue, namely,

    It is currently hard to intergrate 3rd party/contrib/new applets


The fundamental problem then is the mechanism for adding a new applet is not
very patch friendly. To integrate a 3rd party/contrib/new applet requires the
addition of the applet file itself, and requires editing of Config.h, usage.h,
and applets.h.  But these files change often causing patch to frequently fail.
Furthermore, some of these files have additional constraints (such as how
applets.h must be sorted) which patch cannot guarantee will be satisfied.

The only sane and scalable way I can think of to address this is have each
applet be a complete and standalone entity which is completely decoupled from
busybox's internals.

For example, if each applet included its own APPLET("name", name_main, DIR) 
stuff, we could basically grep for that stuff at compile time, sort it,
and create the master applet list dynamically.

 -Erik

--
Erik B. Andersen   email:  andersen at lineo.com
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